[1] Two adventurers, Dick Hardwicke and Archibald Martesque, use a map bequeathed by a dying explorer to discover a golden lake hidden in the Australian interior.

3, April 2004) Melissa Bellanta includes this novel under the general category of Australian "lost race romances" along with Francis Hogan's The Lost Explorer (1890), Ernest Favenc's The Secret of the Australian Desert (1896) and Marooned on Australia (1896), John David Hennessey's An Australian Bush Track (1896), George Firth Scott's The Last Lemurian (1898), Rosa Praed's Fugitive Anne (1902), Alexander MacDonald's The Lost Explorers (1906) and William Sylvester Walker's The Silver Queen (1908).

[2] Writing in The Brisbane Courier at the time of the book's publication, a reviewer stated: "This work of "The Golden Lake" is Rider Haggard, out-haggarded.

It is a bold feat of stand and deliver, every faculty but credulity, and it deserves corresponding approbation to find in these latter days of scepticism, a writer and a publisher with coinage sufficient to count upon a remunerative quantity of readers.

"[3] A reviewer in The Sydney Morning Herald was equally as scathing: "To be entirely devoid of imagination is bad, although the persons so circumstanced are generally ignorant of their misfortune; but it is not so bad as to possess an imagination which submits to no control - a fancy which, once fairly started, revels in a phantasmagoria of incredibilities.